


All the Riches

by the_dala



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Miscommunication, Romantic Gestures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26064772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_dala/pseuds/the_dala
Summary: The letters dwindled after three months, then halted entirely after six months. At first Elizabeth worried.
Relationships: Elizabeth Swann/Will Turner
Kudos: 24





	All the Riches

**Author's Note:**

> Finally getting back to archiving my old Pirates fic - this was originally published March 28th, 2005.

The letters dwindled after three months, then halted entirely after six months. At first Elizabeth worried. She followed the commodore around, pestering him about his own reports from the area, until he informed her that the _Pearl_ had been sighted not three days before, apparently whole and healthy. Returning home, she sat under the beech tree in a brown study. The imagination she had cultivated with clandestine sensationalist literature led her to concoct myriad violent scenarios, but her innate practicality dismissed them before she became too upset. If Will had been injured or fallen ill or worse, Jack would have written her by now. In any case, a disaster didn’t fit the pattern – correspondence had become so scanty that it had taken her ages to even realize how long it had been since the last letter.

She climbed to her feet and stretched her cramping legs, then went to retrieve Will’s letters from beneath her bed. The sun sank past the horizon and her lamp burned late into the night as she pored over the pages spread out on the floor. His early letters still made her smile. In his meticulous hand, exactly as she remembered it from childhood, he traded details of the sailor’s life for shy expressions of how he cared for her and missed her. She had read these words so often that entire phrases were imprinted upon her memory, the pages creased from constant folding and unfolding.

As the dates above the salutations grew nearer, they grew farther apart, and the following content grew shorter. It was much the same at first; there was just less of it. She hadn’t been peeved. She understood that he was busy making their fortune, or at least what they would need to buy the smithy and furnish its meager living quarters without her father’s help, for which Will did not want to ask. She had treasured these letters as much as or more than their lengthy predecessors.

The final pair of letters, however, had rather upset her when they arrived. The first one had come nearly four months ago, the second one a month and a half after that. It wasn’t merely that they were short and far apart. Will’s tone, which she had grown adept at detecting after so much time spent with his writing, was distracted and restless. There were words imperfectly scratched out and blotches of ink splattered across the page, while the earlier letters had been so pristine and spotless, she was sure he’d copied them over from rough drafts.

It had been over two months since she’d last heard from him, eight months since he’d left Port Royal. Before that time passed, she had been certain that his affection for her would not waver no matter what trials he encountered. He had promised he would return as soon as he was able, and would be gone no longer than a year at the outside. It had seemed an unbearably long stretch at the time, but neither of them believed his voyage would actually last that long.

Now the end of that year was closer than it was far away, and she found herself doubting all the things they had pledged one another. At night she dreamed of Will kneeling before some unseen woman, only recognizable by the hem of her skirts and the slender hands laid upon his head. She saw him floating, them drowning, the dirty green weeds reaching up to clasp him. The dark corners of her slumbering mind became the interior of the cave of the Isla de Muerte, where Will sat upon the stone chest and flipped a coin in his skeletal hand.

She was careful to keep these doubts to herself, determined not to give her father the satisfaction. He had warned her, gently but firmly, that youth would have its head and she may not like the outcome of Will's exposure to new freedoms. Elizabeth said nothing of her fiancé’s virtual disappearance, but in her heart she wept, she raged, she despaired. Jealousy twisted such knots in her guts that she drank ginger tea by the pot. Jealousy of perceived rivals, be they other women or the lure of treasure or his friendship with Jack or the sea in his blood. Jealousy that Will could stretch himself so far while she was confined to this tiny island town. Jealousy that whatever the outcome would be, he knew it and would not tell her.

She lived in quiet agony for several weeks before, on a walk from the widow Beecher’s home, she bumped into Will on the street.

Despite all her misgivings, her first instinct was to throw her arms around him in front of God and the gossips, one of whom she was sure would forgive her impropriety. Her heart sank down to her shoes when Will stiffened, his back straight as a board, before embracing her awkwardly.

Elizabeth stepped back immediately, remembering how he had neglected her. Now a genuine smile bloomed on his familiar face, but she steeled herself against it.

“Elizabeth, I have missed you so,” he said, clasping her hands in his own. She had forgotten the roughness of them – or perhaps they were changed now as well, sailor’s hands.

“Why did you not write?” She hated to hear herself, shrewish and cold, but Will didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m terribly sorry – there was so much to do these last few months, and Jack _would_ drag me out into every port we visited, and time seemed to run together till I couldn’t tell one day from another.” His brown eyes studied her anxiously. “Will you forgive me?”

It pleased her so to be near him again, to hear his voice, that she began to relent. If there was something to hide, she would see signs of Will doing so. “Of course.” She beamed at him, darting up to kiss his cheek. “Are you on your way back to the shop? I’ll walk with you.”

“Oh no, that isn’t necessary,” said Will hastily, his brows knitting together. “The afternoon is hot – you should be inside.”

Elizabeth stared at him as though he were a stranger. After everything they had been through together, all this time apart, he was concerned about the bloody climate? “I won't wilt in the sun, Will. I’ll put my hat back up if it will ease your mind.”

“But...” He glanced around at the folk walking past. “It isn’t proper, Elizabeth. People will talk.”

“People already do talk,” said Elizabeth, her eyes narrowed to slits. “But you have been gone for eight months, so you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

At the frostiness of her tone, he gave her a look that made her feel like she’d kicked a puppy. But for heaven’s sake, if he needed a bit of kicking, who better to do it than the woman he was meant to marry?

Apparently deciding that the odds of Elizabeth changing her mind were slim, Will relented. They walked side by side, not touching. Will spoke in a rapid nervous patter, often repeating things he had written about, while Elizabeth made noncommittal sounds and stared straight ahead. She was glad to duck into the cool dimness of the smithy. Brown was nowhere to be seen, but the tools Will had taken with him on the _Pearl_ were laid out near the fire, and there were more completed weapons in the place than she had ever seen at one time.

She stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on a beautiful blade laid out on brown paper on the table. This was far more than a morning’s work could account for. He had been home for some time, and had not seen fit to inform her of his return.

“Elizabeth?” Will asked cautiously, noticing her silence. “Would that be all right with you?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Will you take a walk with me after supper this evening?”

She lifted her chin. “I shall have to ask Father, and he will no doubt insist that Estrella or Bowdin accompany us.”

“Of course,” said Will in a subdued tone. Now she felt as though she’d kicked dirt in his face while he was down. Glancing back at the sword as she left, she felt no remorse.

When the sun rode low in the sky, Will appeared on the front steps. Elizabeth took his arm, her father’s valet trailing behind them at a respectable distance.

“It is a lovely night, don’t you think?” Will asked, his eyes bright with hope.

She shrugged and his face fell. After a moment of silence, he rallied again. “Have I told you about the Spanish lady who tried to strangle Jack with her pantaloons?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth shortly, although he hadn’t.

“Oh.” Will looked down at the dust they were kicking up, and didn’t speak for several minutes.

Just as the silence was beginning to drive her mad, Will came to a stop and she almost tripped over his feet. Irritated, she looked up. They had come to the eastern edge of the town, approaching a large meadow that had once belonged to the previous governor. They had played here as children, but for a moment she didn’t recognize it. Overgrown brush and weeds had been cleared away, leaving neat green grass and a clearing of bare earth, from which rose a frame of pale, unvarnished wood.

“What’s all this?” Curiosity momentarily overcame her displeasure with her companion.

Will took in a long, slow breath before answering, “Our home.”

Elizabeth blinked.

He began to talk too fast again, the words tumbling out like he’d been holding them in for ages. “Or – or it will be soon, if you – please don’t be cross with me, Elizabeth! I never meant to be gone so long, but I needed the payment for the property, and the lumber and labor, and to hire a man Jack knows to draw up the plans. The design is far from grand, but there’s the parlor, and the cellar, and there will be three bedrooms on the second floor, and a vegetable garden, and I’ve left that tree over there with the rope swing still on it...”

“You didn’t pay for all this from a single share on a letter-of-marque,” was all she could think to say.

Will shook his head, encouraged even by this dubious statement. “No, I took the title of journeyman to heart and split my time between blacksmith and sailor. I sent out letters to tradesmen in the areas we proposed to sail, and they each let me stay on for several weeks at a time. The profit was the sales was very good. I have been skulking around in town for a week, working to scrape up the last of the capital I needed so we wouldn’t begin our life in debt. I wrote to your father as well, and he seemed taken with all the plans. He has agreed to include two servants and a cook as part of your dowry. I –”

He finally seemed to run out of steam and he cast his eyes to the ground, his cheeks coloring a dull pink. “This is hardly an estate, I know. It will not compare to the life you lead now, but it...Elizabeth, it is all for you.” Now he raised his face to hers, looking almost ill with apprehension. “If you will still have me.”

She raised one hand to his cheek and brushed a few stray tears from her face with the other. “Will,” she said around a lump lodged in her throat.

Then she laughed, loud and unladylike. “Of course I will, you absolute – dear – _idiot_!” she exclaimed, hurling herself at him. Will lifted her off the ground and swung her in a circle, which only made her laugh harder between kisses.

“How does it look? If you don’t like the plans, I could ask Mr. Henry to –”

“It looks lovely! Don’t you dare change a thing!”

“I’ve waited so long to see your face – this exact face,” he said, tracing her smile with his fingertips. “I wanted to tell you at first, but Jack thought it would be better as a surprise.”

Elizabeth tried to frown in disapproval, but the muscles of her mouth wouldn’t obey. “He did, did he?” Sparrow probably knew exactly how she’d react and was off having a laugh at her expense, that contrary, rum-soaked, salty –

“I owe him more thanks than I can ever give. The house and the means of getting it were his idea, and he invested some of his own gold as well."

– shrewd, wonderful man. “He is invited to the wedding,” she said firmly.

The fading light caught stars in Will’s eyes. “For a moment there, I feared there would never be a wedding.”

If he’d looked sad or resentful, Elizabeth would have prostrated herself and begged his forgiveness until she was blue in the face. But there was no room in Will for anything but joy, and she knew he would wave her apologies away. So instead she kissed him again, a deep, searching kiss that left them both breathless.

“Oh, there will be a wedding, Mr. Turner, have no doubt about that,” she said tartly.

"Why does that sound like a threat?" Will wanted to know, one eyebrow quirked.

Elizabeth tutted at him. "You have spent entirely too much time around Jack, you know."

"Oh, quite," Will agreed. "But I am home now."

She turned her face into his neck, breathing in the scent of him -- earth and cinders and some salt air yet. "Yes, you are."


End file.
